If everyone’s a Hindu, would a true want to be one?

If you are an Indian, you are a Hindu, whether you know it or don’t know it, whether you like it or don’t like it. Indeed, every Indian you know, wherever that person may live, in this country or abroad, is also a Hindu, no matter what faith system that person professes.

If we are Indian, we are Hindu, and that’s that, no arguments please. That’s what minorities minister Najma Heptullah said, echoing the words recently spoken by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat who said that India was a ‘Hindu nation’. Heptullah’s remark endorses the fact that the BJP is the political wing of the RSS, with its ideological agenda of what is called ‘cultural nationalism’, a euphemism for turning secular and inclusive India into a non-secular, exclusivist Hindu rashtra.

Heptullah, who after decades in the Congress joined the BJP in 2004, later amended her remarks by saying that she had used the word ‘Hindi’ and not ‘Hindu’, a modification unlikely to find favour with non-Hindi speakers. Arabic tradition refers to India as ‘al-Hind’, the word ‘Hind’ said to be derived from the river Indus. So, all those who lived on the farther side of the Indus were described as ‘Hindus’.

By this interpretation, the word Hindu denotes not a religion, or faith system, but a nationality, like American, or German, or Indonesian.

By this token, according to Heptullah and all those who share her views, there was nothing wrong in referring to people as ‘Hindu Muslims’, or ‘Hindu Christians’.

The people so described, however, might hold a different view, and claim as their constitutional right to espouse whatever religion or faith community they freely choose to belong to.

The anxieties of such people have been all the more pronounced in following the BJP’s recent electoral victory in the general elections which has brought the party to power at the Centre. The saffron party’s resounding victory at the polls has led to a reassertion of Hindu right-wing organisations who assail whoever and whatever they feel doesn’t conform to their ideology.

Books are banned because they are allegedly ‘anti-Hinduism’. Christians are ‘reconverted’ to Hinduism, willingly or otherwise. Inter-community marriages between a Muslim man and a Hindu woman are labelled ‘love jihads’, and seen as an Islamic strategy to subvert Hinduism.

This assertion of an overriding Hindu identity as the root of Indian nationalism, however, is fundamentally flawed. And the flaw lies in the very nature of true Hinduism itself.

If there is any central tenet of that eclectic way of life that is called Hinduism is that there is no coercion in it; the idea of conversion is completely alien to it.

This makes what is called Hinduism so distinctly different from other faith systems like Islam and Christianity in which conversion, or proselytism, is an essential part of their credo.

By seeking to impose the Hindu label on others, the proponents of Hindutva are not enlarging the concept of Hinduism but narrowing it and demeaning it. In its broadest sense, Hinduism is beyond categorisation. There are pure vegetarian Hindus, and Hindus who eat beef. There are Hindus who daily visit temples, and Hindus who are avowedly atheist.

The one thing that Hindus, who are true to the core Hinduistic belief in tolerance, are not is that they are not dogmatic. In fact dogma, of any kind, is the antithesis of true Hinduism.

So when individuals or organisations like the RSS dogmatically assert that every Indian is essentially a Hindu, like it or lump it, the true Hindu, who shuns dogmatism, might well paraphrase Groucho Marx who famously said that he wouldn’t belong to any club that would have him as a member.

Like Groucho, the true Hindu might say that he wouldn’t belong to any Hinduism which forced him, and others, to be Hindus against their will.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Author

A former associate editor with the Times of India, Jug Suraiya writes two regular columns for the print edition, Jugular Vein, which appears every Friday, and Second Opinion, which appears on Wednesdays. He also writes the script for three cartoon strips. Two are in collaboration with Ajit Ninan, Like That Only which appears twice a week on Wednesday and Saturday and Power Point which appears on the Edit page of Times of India every Thursday. He also does a joint daily cartoon strip which appears online in collaboration with Partho Sengupta. His blog takes a contrarian view of topical and timeless issues, political, social, economic and speculative.

A former associate editor with the Times of India, Jug Suraiya writes two regular columns for the print edition, Jugular Vein, which appears every Friday, a. . .